The use of consumer devices to conduct financial transactions is growing in popularity. Consumer devices ranging from personal computers to cellular phones can all be used to conduct financial transactions. Various means of using consumer devices to conduct financial transactions have been tried. One of the most common means for conducting a financial transaction involves sending a payment to a payee using the payee's cellular phone number as an identifier. This approach, however, gives rise to several problems. First, the payee must have a cellular phone which is capable of receiving the payments. Second, the payer must know the payee's phone number. As cellular phone numbers tend to change frequently, a payer must make certain that the phone number being used is current. The payer otherwise runs the risk of sending a payment to an unintended third party, who has been assigned the intended payee's old phone number. In some cases, the payor and payee may not wish to reveal personal information such as their cellular phone numbers or financial account information to each other. Additionally, the payor and payee may wish for the payment to be sent to or sent from a specific financial account associated with one of the parties to the transaction.
Alias identifiers have been developed to address some of these problems. Alias identifiers are generally described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/767,033, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety for all purposes.
As alias identifiers have become more widely used, some problems with alias identifiers have arisen. In some embodiments, a payment processing network, or other centralized entity, controls the database and server computers used to create alias identifiers and used to resolve alias identifiers during payment transactions. One consequence of this centrally controlled alias identifier system is that financial institutions that manage accounts do not have very much control over the aliases associated with their accounts. Financial institutions have expressed the need to have more control over their aliases and a greater ability to track the aliases associated with their accounts. In the context of a centrally managed system, giving many different financial institutions control over their aliases while at the same time maintaining the integrity of the system can be problematic and needs to be implemented in a fashion that does not cause problems in the system's functionality. An additional problem that has developed for consumers is that if a first consumer creates an alias for their identity, a second consumer cannot create the same alias for their identity even if the second consumer does not have any accounts with the financial institutions of the first consumer.
Embodiments of the invention address these and other problems.